Bullying

Anti-bullying week is coming up in November, and it is something which we dedicate a large amount of time and effort to in schools, not just during that week but all year round. I was thinking this evening how strange it is that we are so tough on bullying among children, yet we have so many schools, businesses and offices in which bullying is endemic and even accepted. My first experience of teaching was a stressful and extremely difficult one, due to the nature of the head teacher. She would routinely humiliate staff and she piled on the pressure to

I’m about to go to bed after a good but tiring first day back at school with the children, but I wanted to post briefly about something that’s been on my mind… It has struck me recently that sometimes I actually hamper my own progress because I am frightened. I am talking about spiritual progress, or essentially about coping with a particular difficult life circumstance. I think that many of us do this. In the particular, personal situation I am thinking of (moving on from a complicated relationship) I feel sometimes that I am actually doing a lot better than

Things are progressing, I know. Despite my trying to breathe in every detail of the moment in some childlike hope of preserving it–the shop-bought fragrance that releases in occasional puffs from beneath the hostess trolley by the door, the warm rumblings of the cat’s belly against my thigh, the silenced tennis match on the TV, the way the pale light falls in uneven stripes through the old, broken blinds—things are progressing (regressing?) and there is nothing we can do about it. We are simultaneously slipping through the wide sinkhole of the future, and falling back through the broken pieces of

Courage rarely explodes in a rush of love and sunlight. Those incidences occur, but they are rare. Mostly, courage is a fraction. A part of a whole. A whisper that says “I know you’re scared, but stand your ground this time.” Courage is diminutive. It rolls with the tide and changes shape. It swells and sighs and alters its opinions depending on the situation. Courage is a long road between the mountains. Courage is speaking out when everyone else is silent. Courage is remaining silent when everyone else is shouting. Courage is pursuing your dreams quietly, diligently, despite the doubt

Like this:

Show me the weariest part of you, the soft and sodden heart of you that trembles in the silence and in the absence of friends. Show me the darkest thoughts that come like twisting shadows, blocking the sun. Show me the fractures, the wild projections of your lens. I’ll show you the tender root of me, the shaking child and the soaking leaves, all the concepts and lies on which my Self depends. And we’ll see then, in the cloud of our gloom, the spacious sky and the strawberry moon, and the love and the light that burn without end.